Immortal Twilight (25 page)

The airship lurched as it began to turn beneath the clouds with a shudder of the rudder.

* * *

K
ANE
HEARD
G
RANT
’
S
instruction over the Commtact, but it was distant, as if coming from another room. There was something pushing against his throat, he realized, tight as a vise.

His eyes snapped open and he saw the figure before him. The once-handsome Dorian looked deranged now, his colleagues felled, his plan unraveled. Around them, the sound of rushing wind was picking up as the airship began to descend furiously toward the helpless citizens of Luilekkerville.

“They were to be my greatest performance,” Hugh was ranting as he increased the pressure on Kane’s throat. “A commentary on the wonder and hopelessness of war and progress.” He glanced past Kane, down to the streets where some of the recovered locals were running for cover. “Perfect for a moment in time, remembered forever.”

“Don’t you realize?” Kane gasped through his closing windpipe. “Everything you did left corpses in its wake. Your chaos is killing them.”

“Exactly,” Hugh shrieked at Kane. “They were all to die in the name of art. It would have been
their
immortality.

“Oh, the songs they would have written about this day,” Hugh snarled, increasing the pressure on Kane’s windpipe with his superhuman hands. “But you and your colleagues ruined it. The death of art is upon us. You have killed the greatest dream man can ever hope to achieve.”

Kane’s left hand reached for a pouch in his belt where one last metallic sphere waited and with his last ounce of strength, shoved it into Hugh’s open mouth, releasing its contents in a blush of white like snow.

“Yeah?” Kane croaked through his closed windpipe. “Have a new dream on me.”

The powder burst forth in a great cloud from the tiny metal sphere, releasing a handful of glist into the superman’s mouth and nostrils as he screamed at his enemy. Whatever happened after that, Kane wouldn’t know—he had blacked out from the pressure on his throat.

Chapter 28

Brigid crouched amid a cluster of redwoods roughly a mile out from Luilekkerville, working at the controls for the interphaser. The setting sun had painted the trees a pinkish hue, and the same color danced across the mirrored sides of the interphaser where it rested on the dirt before her, its tiny display alive with lights. She had input the parallax point for this region, and it was set to open a gateway to Cerberus for a few seconds so they could send the Dorians to the makeshift holding station in the mat-trans chamber. Interphaser ready, Brigid brought herself to a standing position and scanned the horizon, impatiently tapping her boot’s toe against the dry soil.

“Come on, guys—where are you?” she muttered.

Suddenly the Commtact in her head burst to life with Grant’s voice. “Now, everybody just hang on,” he said. His voice sounded urgent and strained.

“Grant, what’s happening?” Brigid asked, engaging her Commtact’s pickup instinctively. “I’m at the parallax point out in the woods but there’s no sign of—” She stopped, her words catching in her throat as she saw the curiously styled airship lunge over the walls of the ville and begin a hurried passage toward her. “Grant? The airship’s coming—and it’s moving fast.”

“I’m in the pilot’s chair,” Grant explained, “but the controls are shot. Long story. Suffice to say I’m doing all I can to hold her aloft. Where are you?”

“About a mile out from the south wall,” Brigid told him. “Do you have the Dorians captured?”

“Not as such,” Grant admitted. “I’ve got a live a-bomb under this thing and I need to get it out of the ville. I’m trying to figure somewhere to dump it after that. Any ideas?”

Brigid eyed the blot in the sky for just a moment, estimating its speed and the angle of descent. “I have one,” she said, “but it’s a long shot.” Even as she spoke, she had crouched back down before the interphaser and began to tap in a sequence on the keys, searching the files for a new destination.

“Long shot’s about where we’re at at this stage of the game,” Grant admitted. “What’s your plan?”

“If I open a quantum window with the interphaser, do you think you could drop the nuke inside?”

Grant muttered something unrepeatable before he answered. “You weren’t kidding about the long shot,” he said. “Where are we looking?”

“Parallax point on the tree line, south of the ville,” Brigid told him.

“Yeah, I used that parallax point once to help Domi out of a jam,” Grant recalled, “but it was a while ago. I’m trying to remember where it was.”

“Among the redwoods on the ridge,” Brigid said.

* * *

C
ROUCHED
OVER
the pilot’s podium of the airship, Grant was fighting with a control yoke that seemed determined to steer him to port. He peered up through the shattered window, saw the great line of redwood trees running across most of the right-hand side of his view. “Lot of trees out there, Brigid,” he said. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“Try ten degrees to your starboard,” came Brigid’s response. “I’ll open the window when you’re close and you should see it.”

“I’m losing altitude here,” Grant told Brigid. “Not sure how long we have.”

* * *

B
RIGID
EYED
the approaching airship, swiftly calculating its trajectory in her head. It was only forty feet off the ground now and moving at some considerable speed. It would be close.

Assuming Grant could navigate it through the outermost trees of the forest, he should pass over the parallax point in thirty seconds’ time, at which point he would still be airborne—
just.

“Keep coming starboard,” Brigid told him. “You’ll make it.”

* * *

“T
HIS
BIRD
DOESN
’
T
seem to like starboard awful much,” Grant muttered, wrestling with the reticent controls. His dark eyes were fixed on the wall of trees that were rushing toward him as the vehicle dipped ever lower.

“Keep coming,” Brigid instructed. “I’m opening the quantum phase window—
now.
”

Grant grit his teeth as he pulled with all his strength at the controls, forcing the rudder around one last time as the ground and tree trunks came hurtling toward the viewport. Then, materializing from nowhere, he saw the quantum window bloom into life, a roiling swirl of colors like some magnificent flower budding, distant streaks of lightning cascading in its impossible depths. It was the interphase window, opening a gateway between here and beyond.

“I hope you planned this right,” Grant muttered as he yanked the bomb release. Beneath his feet, he felt as much as heard something shunt in place as the catch slipped its hooks and the bomb began its brief descent.

A moment later leaves filled his view as the airship slammed into the trees, and Grant heard the great wrenching of metal as the undercarriage of the gondola tore through the topsoil in a howl of strained joints.

* * *

O
N
THE
GROUND
,
Brigid had made as much space between her and the interphaser as she could, sprinting out from the trees and down toward the track that ran to Luilekkerville.

The interphaser was the product of alien science, and it relied on a complex web of linked points to connect the quantum windows it opened. These were dotted right across the globe, one here, one at Cerberus, numerous others all across the Earth. And there were also others, many others, located across the solar system and beyond, out into the deepest reaches of space.

In the thirty seconds she had had to reprogram the interphaser, Brigid had input a parallax point in phase with the moon, approximately 225,000 miles above the Earth.

Brigid hit the ground anyway as the atom bomb slunk toward Earth and into the quantum window, hands over her head in preparation for an explosion that never came.

The distance of the moon to Earth varies by as much as 20,000 miles depending on the time of year. At a different point in its orbit to the parallax point that the interphaser had accessed, the moon was thousands of miles away from where the window opened and the atomic bomb was suddenly dropped. As such, the moon witnessed nothing of the bomb’s silent explosion in the vacuum, far away from human eyes.

* * *

T
HE
AIRSHIP
LOOKED
as if it had been through hell. The deflated balloon was still spitting hydrogen in a whining hiss, and the protective cage around it looked like the mangled remains of so much roadkill. Brigid was the first on the scene, searching the wreckage for Grant and Kane, repeating their names into her Commtact.

She found Grant lying in a pool of blood in the pilot’s cabin. As the lowest segment of the ship, the cabin had struck the ground first and taken the brunt of the impact. It had crumpled but survived, creating a protective box around Grant and his companion. The blood, thankfully, belonged to the Dorian called Algernon, who was still pinned to the cabin’s ceiling by Shizuka’s
katana.

Grant roused after a few taps from Brigid, a tentative smile forming on his lips. Grant was tough; he could take a lot of punishment and still smile. “Did we do it?” he asked.

Brigid nodded. “Never doubted you for a moment,” she assured him. “Kane’s not reported in,” she added.

Grant looked up and around. “I lost track of him. He was in the passenger compartment when I last saw him.”

Together, the two Cerberus warriors clambered through the wreckage to said compartment, where the two Dorian women lay ensnared in one another’s minds. They lay there with eyes wide-open, their skirts about their waists. They looked like victims of some hideous shell shock too traumatic to relate.

They found Kane shortly after that, caught beneath a cross of broken metal beams that had saved him from more serious harm. He lay beside the last—and first—of the Dorians, the dark-haired Hugh, who simply sat and babbled to himself, his eyelids closed against reality. It would be some time before Kane could explain how he had employed the dreamers’ glist as a weapon against Hugh, an immortal soldier who could shrug off flames and outrace bullets, but who could never let go of his need to dream.

Chapter 29

The people of Luilekkerville were safe. Hurt, wounded and with a number of dead. Forty people had died in the bloody combat but none had died from the brain trauma they had suffered at the mind of Hugh Danner. And none had died from the atom bomb that had been diverted at the very last second by Grant and Brigid. Kane could live with that. All things considered, it was a good result, one the ville would recover from.

Now Kane stood marveling at one of the grandest storage facilities he had ever seen. The walls were decorated with ornamental red columns that towered to five times his height, with each face of each column carved with an elaborate beast, a tiger or a dragon or a snake whose tail curled around the height of the column in a dizzying spiral. Despite being located belowground, the ceiling was at least forty feet above him, and the echoes of voices as he tracked across the room flittered back to him like a church choir in song. “Quite the place you have here,” he observed as he turned to the facility’s owner.

Peering up from a datapad, Shizuka smiled prettily. There were dark circles under her eyes and her skin had lost a little of its glow, Kane noticed, but otherwise she looked to be back in the prime of health. The fact that Grant had spent every moment checking on her and running after her ever since she had awoken from her coma three days ago had helped her relax back into her role as leader of the Tigers of Heaven. Even now, Grant was busying along one of the Tigers as they set the installation up and ran through a final check of the equipment that Cerberus had brought to New Edo via mat-trans.

“I am honored that you approve, Kane-san,” Shizuka deadpanned, but Kane caught a glimpse of her wicked smile as she turned back to her datapad. “Does Brigid know you are here?”

Kane shook his head. “Just on my way to see her,” he said.

A dozen feet away, dominating a cordoned-off area beneath a set of bright lights, was one of the dream engines, its gnarled treelike growth expanding up into the air to end in a series of thick tubes that fed the data to the engine, six beds posed around its base in the familiar rose-petal formation. Five of those beds were occupied by the five Dorians, each wired up to the dream tech, their altered consciousness hooked into an ongoing simulation that could respond to their interactions in an ever-developing scenario; a lot like life.

A dozen Tigers of Heaven warriors, dressed head to toe in modern samurai chic—supple armor that looked more like biker wear, the curve of a sheathed
katana
blade resting at each man’s left hip—bustled about the dream engine, running data checks and systems analyses under the supervision of Brigid Baptiste and Donald Bry, who had stripped, cataloged and remodeled the dream engines once they had been brought back from Hope. To see one of them back in use here, functioning as a trap for the minds of the immortal soldiers, sat uncomfortably with Kane, but he knew it would have to suffice until a better solution presented itself. In a few days, the Tigers of Heaven would take over the monitoring and upkeep of the dream engine themselves, holding the Dorians in this hidden facility beneath New Edo where they would remain safe from discovery. It wouldn’t do to have them set loose again the way they had been from the Nevada installation. Better to leave them trapped in a dream than to run the risk of their getting loose and trying to run the world as some gigantic death-art exhibit again.

“Yeah,” Kane muttered, “what the hell was
that
about?”

“Did you say something?” Brigid asked as she looked up from her programming work.

Kane brushed absently at his hair as he eyed the towering dream engine set amid the sealed crates and other odd items in this storehouse. “Nah,” he said. “Just wondering what you did with them. In there, I mean.”

“While you were sleeping things off?” Brigid teased.

Kane rolled his eyes. “I got pushed through an airship wall,” he reminded her. “I think I deserved a few days’ rest and recoup.”

Brigid looked at him and laughed. “So, what Donald and I have done here is program a virtual environment that the Dorians should recognize,” she explained. “Once we leave, the Tigers of Heaven will continue to tend to their basic needs—nutrition, hydration, etc.”

“How’s that work?” Kane queried.

“Controlled measures, intravenously,” Brigid explained, lifting an IV line that was connected to the wrist of Algernon’s sleeping form. The man’s chest was still streaked black where he had been skewered, but the scar seemed to be healing nicely now. Seeing that reminded Kane how impossible these people were to kill. “Under Reba’s scrutiny, we’ve added a very small dosage of glist to the cocktail, which should enhance the experience sufficiently so that they won’t think to question it.”

“You questioned it,” Kane pointed out.

“I went in programmed to question it,” Brigid told him. “That was why I was there, remember?”

“‘Remember,’” Kane repeated with a grin. “Your idea of a joke, right?”

It was Brigid’s turn to roll her eyes.

“Question is,” Grant said as strode over carrying a large pallet of packaged glist in his arms, “what happens when the glist runs out?”

“Well,” Brigid said, “we can’t refine more, to do so would be inhuman. But we snagged a pretty big supply from Red O’Shumper, and Reba is even now working with the Cerberus lab techs to create an artificial substitute.”

“So it could still be a problem?” Grant checked, concern in his voice.

“Not for a while,” Brigid assured them, gesturing to several identical pallets of glist to the one Grant held, “and hopefully by then we’ll have a more long-term solution.”

Kane looked at the five dreamers as they relaxed in the embrace of the dream engine. “
Long-term
is right,” he reminded his partners. “These psychopaths are going to outlive us and everyone else in this room, and everyone else on the planet.”

“Except maybe Lakesh,” Brigid said, lightening the mood.

“Sure,” Kane agreed. But as he stood there staring at the dream engine burbling away to itself, he couldn’t help but wonder what would distract an immortal soldier long enough to stop them breaking out of the false reality and trying to conquer the world.

* * *

T
HE
WIDOW
WORE
BLACK
. She had worn black since the day her husband has died in 1861, a tribute to their love eternal.

The widow glided among the Dorians, her long skirts swishing around her like black mist, a short figure yet still imposing. Her fearsome stare locked with each supersoldier she strode past as if in challenge. Lined up in the midday sun, the Dorians held firm, watching as the ultimate authority in the British Empire walked past them, surveying each of them in turn.

“This is quite the display, Professor,” she said, turning to the scarecrowlike figure of Edgar Howard as he reintroduced his new breed of men, “seeing them all together like this after all that your Dorians have done.”

“I trust you approve, Your Highness?” Professor Howard asked, his American accent seeming somehow too casual for the echoing surrounds of Windsor Castle’s courtyard. The courtyard had been decorated with gold-trimmed red carpet and banners, and three battalions of Her Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers stood stock-still waiting for the official ceremony to begin.

Queen Victoria halted before General Hugh Danner—always her favorite—and openly admired him, her eyes working from the beautiful, empire-made leather shoes of his feet right up to his perfectly coiffed brown hair and those crystal-bright eyes that burned like sapphires in the midday sun. “How could one not?” she asked in her always-regal tone.

Hugh felt himself begin to blush at that, but he held firm, meeting the queen’s eyes and spying the trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “Black suits you, Your Highness,” he said, keeping his tone low enough that only she heard the compliment.

Hugh stood beside his partners: good old Algie, his right-hand man and the person responsible for saving his life twice over in India; Antonia, his would-be bride, whose strategic insights had annexed a whole slice of the Far East and absorbed it into the empire, leaving just a few local stragglers in their wake; Harold, ever dashing in his opera cape, the white dueling scar running down by his eye where he had fought with some jumped-up Prussian baron in the dining hall of his own ruddy keep; and Cecily—sweet “Silly”—who had tempted then married Czar Michael to further the empire’s push into the new Anglo-Russian territories. Czar Michael was around somewhere, doubtless sampling Bertie’s finest scotch or similar while the final preparations were made for the ceremony that would honor the Dorians for their work in creating a stable world under her majesty’s rule.

“Together, these five have redrawn our map,” the queen reminded the professor, “and to them each is owed a great debt by the British Empire and the world. Wars have been fought but so many others have been averted in the pursuit of perfection, creating a unity unknown since the heady days of Greece.”

“All war is art,” Hugh said, recalling the innumerable victories that had been performed on his watch as he drove the British Empire to greater heights.

“And all art is war,” Algernon reminded the gathered peoples as they prepared to accept their knighthoods.

It was but a brief lull in the continued expansion of the empire. Tomorrow, pastures new would call. Even now, Howard and his team of scientists were working on new lung functionality for the immortal Dorians with the intention of conquering the ocean depths and perhaps outer space. That would take some doing, but from here, standing in the grand courtyard of Windsor Castle as the sun beamed down to honor them, nothing seemed impossible. A glorious future lay ahead. A dream come true, Hugh realized.

Long live the empire. God save the queen.

* * * * *